1/3 square mile

Ramblersville //Neighborhood // Southwestern Queens

Catherine M. Doxsey has spent most of her 93 years in Ramblersville, a 19th century fishing enclave turned 20th century summer home community turned today’s smallest neighborhood in NYC. The great-grandmother has weathered all sorts of storms including battling City Hall for sewage lines, defending Ramblersville’s reputation against detractors, and most recently, fighting for her home after Hurricane Sandy decimated it.

“Gee whiz, I remember being very young. I'm talking about three years old. My grandmother lived here. I remember my father with the oysters, lobsters and soft-shelled crabs. They caught them here.

I couldn't get over the boardwalk. It was like music to my ears the sound of it. The air, the salt air, my God. Those beautiful shells you hold up to your ear and you hear the ocean pounding. Wow, what a place. It knocked my socks off.

I was married April 12th, 1942. The war was on. He was 21 and I was 18. He was the handsomest thing I ever saw. He knew it though. He went to World War II straight away. By September I found out I was having a baby. I went to the doctor three times. I said, ‘Something is wrong with me.’ He said, ‘Are you married?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘All right, let's see.’ He says, ‘You're having a baby.’ I said, ‘That's impossible.’ He said, ‘What do you mean it's impossible?’ I said, ‘I couldn't be having a baby.’ He said, ‘Yes, you're having a baby.’ He says, ‘Listen, you're a very nervous girl. On the way home stop at the candy store.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Get a pack of Camels. I want you to start smoking because you're very nervous.’ Honest to God. I did. I got a pack of Camels. I went home and tried to smoke. It made me so sick I threw them out. So much for the cigarettes.

I’ve lived in this house since 1954. It was on sale for $7,000 but my husband Wilbur screwed them down to six. I'm on the marsh. On the wetlands. We'd get a full moon and an east wind and the tide would come in the house. I would drain it out, but I loved the place. We had an old rowboat. When the tide came in I rowed the kids over to 99th Street where there was a sidewalk that wasn’t underwater.

It's called Ramblersville because no two houses faced the same way. That they have rotten names for Ramblersville, the people. They call it ‘Down in The Hole.’ There was a guy who called himself the historian of Howard Beach and he would talk about the drunks and the stills and all the rotten things. It's been neglected. It's been let go. It's always been looked down on. That's all right because we're tougher than they are. I used to take my son into the yard and tell him, ‘This is sacred soil in the United States of America.’

The storm had a bad effect on me. I didn’t want to leave. The police were going up and down taking names of those that were staying. I took 49 inches in the house. If I had stayed I would have drowned because I sleep on a chair downstairs. I left here with my dog and cat and a few medicines. I thought I'd be back in two days. The refrigerator was full of food, a chicken and all this. I moved in with my daughter. It was two years before I was back. I agonized over losing so many things that were precious.

I thought to myself, ‘What can I do?’ I thought, ‘I know what I'll do. I'm going to sing every song I know and see if I know all the words.’ That's what I did. I didn't sing out loud because I didn't want to bother anyone. It worked. It got me through it. You can't be singing and thinking about music and be awfulizing your life at the same.

All the furniture floated, everything fell. The entire house had to be gutted, the floors, the walls, the electric, everything. It was a horror show. I came back because I love it here. I have to be by the water, I know that.

The city tried to buy us out but there's all kinds of regulations. I would have to buy another house in the city. I said, ‘What do you think I'm out of my mind?’ I'm not going to buy a place in the city. What for? A lot of people. A lot of cars, a lot of buses. It’s so quiet here. The sky is so beautiful in Ramblersville. Blue, white and the clouds. You don't see that in the city. It's nothing but cement.”

“The Sun” by Harry Crosby // Library Book // New York Public Library Main Branch

The New York Public Library’s Rare Books Division is stacked with astounding works. The collection includes the Gutenberg Bible, the only surviving copy of Columbus’s letter from 1493 announcing his encounter with the New World, and the original handwritten manuscript of Oscar Wilde's ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.’ Michael Inman, the library’s Curator of Rare Books, talks about the tiniest book in the enormous collection of 350,000 books – the only one you need a magnifying glass to read.

“Our classification for miniature books is that the height of the spine is less than three inches tall. It's a bit of an arbitrary distinction. We have around 2,000 of them. As a publishing phenomenon, they've been around for centuries. They were printed then – as is the case now – as novelty items. When you go up to the counter in Barnes & Noble and they have a little spindle rack with little books, it's the same thing. Something that's unique and quaint.

“The Sun” by Harry Crosby is our smallest book. It’s 33 pages. Only 100 copies were printed in 1929. The binding is Moroccan leather and the design on the cover, a little sun, has gilding. It’s very fragile. It was handset in three-point type. That means each letter is only a millimeter. I needed a magnifying glass and a reading glass and between the two I could read it.

The work itself is a prose poem. It’s a meditation on why the sun means so much to him, why he deifies it. He was a sun worshipper, which didn’t mean going to the beach for the afternoon. He literally worshipped the sun. He had a spiritual affinity to it. The work was interesting but I wouldn’t want to read too much more of it. He gave it his best shot. Crosby today is not remembered for his writing. He’s remembered for his wild lifestyle and his talent for spotting writing talent.

He was born into the upper crust of Boston society. His uncle was J.P. Morgan. He had everything laid out for him at his feet but he volunteered to serve in the ambulance corps in World War I. Coming out of the Edwardian Victorian era, he had a romantic sense of war. But he witnessed war’s gruesome nature as the carnage played out on the Western Front. He had a close brush with death driving wounded soldiers back from the front when a shell landed near his ambulance.

Afterwards, he just walked around in circles for no apparent reason. He was shell-shocked and understandably so. That singular event set him on a different course in his life. It affected not just his sense of himself but his broader place in the world and the meaning of life. He came back home and felt lost. It was a world he was no longer part of and that’s why he left soon after to live a life abroad in Paris.

He threw off all the old conventions saddling him and reinvented himself. He became a bon vivant and a bohemian. Drugs and sex, basically. He had an open relationship with his wife. They were known for their wild parties and their wild lifestyles. They were one of the ‘it couples’ of 1920s Paris. Together, they founded the Black Sun Press. They were the first to publish authors who, back then, were unknown and struggling – James Joyce, Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound.

‘The Sun’ was printed just a few a few months before Crosby died. We have the actual envelope he mailed it in from Paris. I love the fact that it's addressed simply to the ‘New York Public Library, New York, USA.’ He probably wanted a copy held in in the library because people like to say their books are in our collection. And to make sure it was preserved.

Why in the world did he make a book this tiny? Just the novelty aspect of it, I suspect.

The last couple of years of his life he spiraled out of control. He died at 31 in a suicide pact with a lover. It was a huge scandal. He had this constant need for new stimulation and new experiences he never could quite satiate. People who knew him said suicide was the ultimate new experience for him. It seems a flippant remark, but he was definitely one of these people not destined to make old bones.

There was some talk at the time of it being a murder-suicide. The coroner said Crosby died several hours after the woman. The odd thing is, he had this inborn need to be constantly writing to chronicle his emotions. Yet he didn’t write a single word while he was sitting there for hours in a room with a dead person. He didn’t even leave a suicide note.”

For decades, diamond cutter Zev Weitman toiled in his cramped factory trying to find a new way to cut a diamond to give it more sparkle. Depending on his mood, the grandfather of 18 might compare his struggles to mathematician John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind” or even Albert Einstein’s quest to discover E = mc 2

“When I first saw “A Beautiful Mind” I thought, ‘OK. This movie, it’s for me.’ I'm embarrassed to say, I have the OCD and he had the schizophrenia. I'm out of the box and he was out of the box. He created an original theory about cooperation that won the Nobel Prize. Me? I'm looking to create the diamond with the best light performance.

I killed myself for 14 years to find it. I told my wife: ‘I'm not coming home tonight. I’m sleeping in the factory.’ Time is money, but I didn’t care about money. My daughter is twenty. When she was little she used to say, ‘Daddy, are you going to work on regular work so you can bring home a little bit of money, or are you going to be doing that other thing?’

Albert Einstein sat there for twenty-five years trying to answer one question and ended up splitting the atom. Most people give up before that.

I created a diamond I call The Rising Sun. I have a patent on it. You first have to understand Marcel Tolkowsky to understand my diamond. In 1919, Marcel Tolkowsky invented the round brilliant diamond cut. It’s the modern-day benchmark of diamond cutting. He figured out what the exact angles coming off of the top of the diamond should be.

But if somebody comes off with a pivotal invention, who says that it’s complete? Who says you can't add to it? You see, Tolkowsky wasn’t changing the arrangement of the eight main facets. He was subjecting them to the ideal angles that he discovered. My contribution is regarding the auxiliary facets. I added some and changed their shapes and rearranged them in order to put them all on ideal angles.

A good metaphor for splitting facets is – think of a house. The foundation stays the same. The roof and the floors don’t change, but you are moving rooms around and splitting rooms to let more light in. My diamond is like a sunburst. It has more light and texture and definition. It has more brilliance and more fire. It has more everything. I mean, there's nothing that it's missing.

I made the discovery in 2009. I spent all night and the next day in the factory and that’s when I saw this beautiful rising sun so clearly. I remember thinking: ‘I’m rich! I don’t have to worry about money anymore!’

It’s about 11:30pm and I walk outside and I see people jumping and screaming and going nuts and I thought: ‘How the hell do they know what I just discovered?’ It was New Year’s Eve and I had no idea. That’s how disoriented I was.

I'm an artist. I remember as a child making a statue of Abraham Lincoln from clay. Think about that. Now, I take a piece of rock and make a beautiful diamond. It's like sculpture. I love diamond cutting but I don't make money doing it. I'm such a good cutter. People know. Without bragging, I make a beautiful job.

They pay me twice as much but I work five times more. It doesn't work out. That’s why I become a teacher. But the teaching stopped because somebody figured out, let's cut diamonds overseas. The industry moved to India. When I came to this 35 years ago, there were 3,000 cutters. Now there aren't even two hundred. I'm left only because I do repairs. I fix other people’s mistakes.

Now I have The Rising Sun. And by the way, there are articles in science journals about my technique. Thank God, they wrote I am achieving more uniform light dispersion than the standard Round Brilliant cut. A diamond is a prism. So it’s all about angles and light performance. It’s optical physics.

Consumers see it with the naked eye. But first you have to create demand. Then supply. Is anybody looking for my new cut? No. You need to advertise first. I'm one guy with no money and I’m against billionaires who don't want my diamonds coming into to the market.

My friend said to me: ‘You're going to make a lot of money. But you're not doing this for the money. You're just doing it for you.’ And it's true. I just want to see the thing light up. I'm obsessed with it.

I’ll tell you what my mother once said about me: ‘Let me tell you something about Zev. Everything that everybody else can do – he can't do. But what he can do – nobody else can do.’”

150 square feet

Studio Flat // Rental Apartment // Upper West Side, Manhattan

Fresh off a breakup, actor Anthony Triolo found the only cheap apartment on Craigslist that wasn’t a hoax. However, it was approximately the same size as the Yankees dugout. In fact, it was so tiny he thought it would just be temporary. That was seven years ago.

“I had been living with a boyfriend for two years. It ended, and I moved back home for three days, and I was just like, ‘I cannot do this.’ So I started looking for apartments. I kept reading the same scams over and over on Craigslist: ‘We're going to South Africa. Just send a security deposit, and you can take care of our luxury apartment rent-free.’

“This was the first apartment that wasn't a scam. It was listed as ‘Tiny Studio.’ My friends had tiny studios, so I thought I knew what a tiny studio was. But I didn’t. I walked in, and I could not even imagine it furnished and done. How could you envision that you could fit a chair, ottoman—everything—in here? It was just so small. I was like, ‘Can I do this?’

“I felt like I didn't really have a choice. My budget was so small. It was cheap for a studio apartment. I would say price per square foot is in line with market rate, but it's only so many little square feet. I looked at it on Black Friday, and I moved in December 1st. This was the only place I looked at. I mean, basically I'm poor at this point. I'm getting over a major breakup. I’m trying to get my life together.

“The first day was really rough. My parents brought their old mattress down here—a queen-size. It was strapped to the roof of the car with all my stuff. My dad and my brother are moving in this queen-size mattress into a shoebox, and my mother's like, ‘Can I help? Can I help?’ I'm just like, ‘Oh my God.’ They got everything in, and I'm like, ‘Everybody out! Bye! I'll deal with you another time.’

“In the beginning, I was buying the cheapest things possible just to function. I didn't have a TV, and I needed one. I walked down the steps, and outside on the street was one of those TVs with a VCR in the thing. I was like, ‘This is a gift from God.’ People throw stuff away all the time in Manhattan. In the Bronx, where I grew up, if you have space, you have one Christmas tree stand. You use it for twenty years. Here, every tree thrown out on the street after the holidays has a stand attached to it. You can reuse that. That doesn't go bad.

“Little by little, I started to invest in the apartment. I’m an actor; you never know how much money you're going to make. I never buy anything on credit. I did the floors, made some built-ins, and put in a marble countertop. People think I’m crazy because I am only renting the place. I tell people you have to invest in your space. I know people who have been in their apartments since 1984, and it’s like, ‘What? Are you never going to paint?’ You live there.’

“When I moved in there was a stove, but who needs a stove, honestly? It takes up too much room. I got rid of it. I don't really enjoy cooking, so I eat out. Coffee I do at McDonald's everyday. It's a dollar.

“With socializing in my apartment, people will be like, ‘Oh my God. Let's go out to the city. We'll get ready in Anthony's apartment.’ I'm like, ‘No, we won't.’ Two people maybe can come in here at a time, and that’s it.

“I watch TV on a love seat, but it’s not even a standard-size love seat. It’s really an oversized chair, but two people can fit in it if they’re both in shape. But, if we were just friends, it's too tight. It’s serves as a couch, but it’s not really a couch. It’s couch-ish.

“I have a queen-size mattress up in the loft. I needed to get a really thin one because otherwise I hit my head when I sit up in bed. The one annoying thing is that you can't see the TV from bed, but I'm not about to have two TVs in a 150-square-foot apartment.

“I go to Central Park a lot. Sometimes I'm just walking around, and people will be texting me like, ‘Where are you? What are you doing?’ I'm like, ‘Oh, I'm walking around.’ They'll tell me I'm weird. I'm like, ‘Do you see the size of my place? I can't sit in here all day. I want to go outside.’”

25 Square Feet

Balla Triangle // Privately Owned Lot // West Village, Manhattan

The spit of land at the corner of Seventh Avenue South and West 10th Street qualifies as the smallest occupied private lot in the New York City. For almost half his life, a Senegalese immigrant named Balla Niang has been the occupant of this tiny triangle. He sells his colorful African wares there from a stall, rain or shine. He mans the place under an umbrella, in an office chair on wheels.

“I’m fifty-seven, and I’m from Senegal. I’ve been here for twenty-five years selling African stuff, and sunglasses and socks and other little things.

I go home to Senegal, and I bring it all back. It’s all cotton and traditional prints. Everything is designed and made in Senegal. The prints are the same as in Senegal, but we make some of it in Western styles. Short pants and stuff like that.

It’s just me here at the stall. Every day I work. Every day. I love to work because my family taught me that you have to work. Work is good.

The heat? I don't care about that. The cold I don’t like as much. Sometimes I go home to Senegal in the winter to see my family because I have no family here. I go home for sometimes up to three months a year.

And this is why I’m telling you I have the best landlord in the world, Dr. Awan. He is a doctor in Brooklyn. He’s in Bensonhurst. He bought it in the eighties, I think for thirty thousand dollars. This is my best landlord because he lets me go home, come back, and then pay rent. Because some landlords, they don't do that, especially not in New York City. I always pay everything, but sometimes I pay after the rent is due, and he let’s me.

Business is not too bad, in a way. African clothing is popular now. Men and women wear it. Most of it is unisex, so anyone can wear it. The colorful stuff is the most popular.

These pants are twenty dollars. If you want to go home and try them on, and, if it doesn't fit right, bring them back here to me. That's what I do for everybody. I don't have room to try clothes on.

“This place has an actual address. It’s 169 West 10th Street. The space is about five feet by five feet, maybe a little bigger. I do want a bigger place, but later. I have no money for that. I can't afford a big rent right now. If I had money I would move, though, because I’d be able to sell more.”